By Charlie B. Dahan

The greatest attribute of the Internet is the vast amounts of music and information available for everyone’s consumption. The worst attribute of the Internet is the vast amounts of music and information available for everyone’s consumption. Anyone with a simple knowledge of code can make their music available to tens of million of users. Today’s internet can provide it’s users a vast library of music that might not be available in your local stores, some brilliant, some, well, not so brilliant. One such website that offers music that in most cases defies definitions and boundaries, as well as offers quality music is XenoMusic.com.

XenoMusic.com was founded by Doug Hoppe in Budapest when he scoured the internet for his father, a Yale trained orchestra conductor’s, favorite music while he lay on his death bed. In his search, Hoppe, found that many of Eastern Europe’s greatest and most eclectic music wasn't available on the Internet or in stores, but that it was not even being recorded. Like many great independent label founders of the past, Hoppe began a mission to remedy that problem immediately.

He took part of his inheritance and began to both make the music of Eastern Europe available to the world, as well as began to record it. XenoMusic.com offers a wide variety of music from Classical to Croatian Surf, Big Band to Bulgarian Ska and Jazz to Czech Acoustic Blues. It also has digital distribution deals with over 60 labels throughout the world. It is a safe bet that if there is a style of music you are looking to listen to or find more artists that perform it So if you are looking for something beyond the mainstream, you will most likely find a wonderful representation of it on XenoMusic.com.

In addition to recording and making available many recordings, XenoMusic.com also records and streams live concerts and holds interactive contests for it’s users. A recent contest called for music fans to borrow tracks from the website and re-mix them with their own beats and samples. XenoMusic.com picked the top ten entries and made them available on the website. The top three winners received a digital distribution contract from XenoMusic.com.

While there are free samples available to the public, each full download costs about a dollar each. XenoMusic.com believes ( and rightly so) that the artist should be compensated for their creation and thus offers a generous split to the artist whose music is purchased and downloaded. So while there are many ways to ‘steal’ music and monies from very deserving artists out there, XenoMusic.com is not one of them.

So take a trip on your computer and hear some intriguing and eclectic music at XenoMusic.com.

Some examples of what you might find on XenoMusic.com:

• Wikeda ­ Ska from Russia
• Lubos Andrst ­ Blues from the Czech Republic
• Sunny Side ­ Bluegrass from the Czech Republic
• Djabe ­ Jazz from Hungry (be sure to check out ‘Coffee Break’)
• Kamil Hala ­ Big Band Orchestra from the Czech Republic
• Josip Magdic ­ Contemporary Classical from Bosnia / Croatia
• Yury Boukoff ­ Classical from Armenia
• The Dresch Dudas Mihaly Quartet ­ Jazz Quartet from Hungry
• Prague Swing Orchestra ­ Swing / Big Band from the Czech Republic
• Quartet B ­ Straight-Ahead Jazz from Hungry